July 29, 2018

Science Fiction Sunday 503

First up is Future World, it's a 2018 post apocalypse film, and sadly it's all pretty below average. James Franco plays the deadly baddie who finds a robot gal, played by Suki Waterhouse, whom some might have seen in The Bad Bunch. James directs, with Bruce Thierry Cheung, and those two co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Davis. Numbers don't mean much but you'd think three people would have a better chance at having a good script than one but it's often a too many cooks problem. Who knows what the problem here was but the result isn't getting many fans over at the IMDb where the movie scores a 3.1 after 2342 votes. I gave it a 3 because it's all so much the same as it's predecessors.

The movie is populated with the usual desert oddballs and creeps that you've been seeing for ages. This movie have that robot gal so that's something you don't see as often. Mind you, I'd seen a movie with a robot gal just a few weeks ago. There's lots of riding around in the desert on motorcycles and scumbags killing anyone who gets in their way. There's an added story element with Lucy Liu as the deadly sick leader of a group of survivors in a nice oasis, her son goes into the wasteland looking for a cure. The robot gal helps him out. After a while I started fast forwarding to get to the end quicker. I wouldn't need to see it again.

I wouldn't need to re-watch Return To The Lost World again either. It's a 1992 sequel to the 1992 film The Lost World. Harry Alan Towers has a hand in both films, they were filmed back to back and released the same year. The Lost World was a slightly better film, it scores a 5.3 on the IMDb, and RTTLW is a 5. It's pretty much a family film and there isn't much violence. The dinosaurs are like something from that Dinosaurs TV show. They do film in Zimbabwe and that's kind of nice to see. Not a place I would ever travel too, but I like seeing it on TV. Nothing much more than light entertainment, the most fun thing about the film is seeing John Rhys-Davies and David Warner.

Pacific Rim Uprising is the 2018 sequel to the 2013 Pacific Rim directed by Guillermo del Toro. Like the first it's loud. It's the directorial debut by Steven DeKnight who had mostly been a writer and producer. He worked on Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse. He also created Spartacus for Starz. I didn't care much for that series after I saw the first season. I didn't ever go back. It's like the HBO series Rome, one depressing thing after another. Who wants to see that? Not this guy.

Mostly Pacific Rim Uprising is OK, though it takes while to get to the robot on monster action. There's plenty of robot on robot action as mysterious robots attack the good robots. It isn't until the last third of the movie that the big critters start to appear. It's been ten years after the big attack in the first movie, people have been stealing robot tech to make their own robots. The pilot of one of those illegal bots is a young woman, Cailee Spaeny in her second movie, who steals robot tech to fund her own project. John Boyega, some might remember him as Moses in Attack The Block, or that guy in those Star Wars films, plays the son of Idris Elba in Pacific Rim. He was a robot pilot but left the program, now he steal robot tech. The two of them get caught with an illegal robot and join up or go to jail. Then there's plenty of action and more noise. I'll probably pick up the Blu-ray of this, I found the first one on Blu-ray for under 3 bucks at HPB and I bet this will turn up like that if I wait a while.